On the closing night of Autumn Cult 2019 (The Gathering), we hosted Winter Family with their performance Hebron H2 and a concert by the family ensemble. At that time, nobody knew that a pandemic was on the horizon, but the concept of lockdown is not new; it runs deep within us. With this poetic darkness, Winter Family returns to Autumn Cult with their fourth documentary theatre performance, in a self-curated double featured evening, which will also include a concert.
For almost two years, Ruth Rosenthal noted discreetly the words, and monologues delivered by Xavier Klaine during their daily life that felt to her, directly or indirectly, as patriarchal mechanisms. It seems that the markers of male domination are omnipresent in our society. Recognizing these markers filled Ruth with an intuitive anger that made her gather and write down the texts which she later asked Xavier to re-record. These recordings became the raw material for this self-centred piece that travels between documentary and an auto-fictional show focusing on their family. These mechanisms are shown in their raw form, a kind of reversed action of the live shows during the lockdown period of the pandemic.
During the show Ruth will then propose a third way. Distant, poetic, radical and fluid, reminding us of the urgency to break free from the binary vision of our Fathers : ”the smallness of men dries up the imagination, kills women and burns the earth”. Winter Family relies here on the example of its own nuclear family in an attempt to deconstruct the daily mechanisms and the banality of the Patriarchy and to offer to the audience a feeling of feminine catharsis. Their daughter, Saralei, will try to help them with the weapons of her generation.
In this show, Winter Family chooses to defy not only the principles of masculine domination but also of gender theory. The family questions cultural appropriation and cancel-culture, borrowing the slogan of the brilliant African-American queer activist Marsha P. Johnson “No Freedom for some of us, without Liberation for all of Us”.
Winter Family finds their way ‘to talk about patriarchy,’ without general overhanging gaze nor cynicism but by an attention given as much to the remains of what many enlightened and progressive people think they have gotten rid of, that to the ingredients necessary for the tortuous path, not immediately victorious, of emancipation and the exit from this confinement perpetually imposed by our civilization. Camille Louis, philosopher
‘The whole thing forms one of the most curious and fascinating mess on the violence of living together and on the effects of patriarchy’ Libération
‘Ruth Rosenthal and Xavier Klaine push their documentary process even further and deliver us with mad audacity a show that is both breathless and oxygenating, burning and screaming, a fire from the old world that ends in an abrasive apotheosis.
We come out all smeared, stirred in all directions but purged and happy
Sceneweb
‘The whole thing forms one of the most curious and fascinating mess on the violence of living together and on the effects of patriarchy’ Libération
French and English, Surtitles in Hebrew
The performance contains high volume, use of smoke, explosive sounds and flickering lights. The show is not recommended for people with photosensitivity and/or epilepsy.
